The National announce tour date at Leeds First Direct Arena ahead of release of their new album

With their eighth studio album I Am Easy To Find due out on Friday May 17, The National has announced their final UK live dates for this year.

The headline shows includes a date at Leeds First Direct Arena on Sunday December 8.

On September 3, 2017, director Mike Mills emailed Matt Berninger to introduce himself and in very short order, the most ambitious project of the National’s nearly 20-year career was born and plans for a hard-earned vacation died.

The Los Angeles-based filmmaker was coming off his third feature, 20th Century Women, and was interested in working with the band on...something. A video maybe. Berninger, already a fan of Mills’ films, not only agreed to collaborate, he essentially handed over the keys to the band’s creative process.

The result is I Am Easy to Find, a 24-minute film by Mills starring Alicia Vikander, and I Am Easy to Find, a 68-minute album by the National.

The former is not the video for the latter; the latter is not the soundtrack to the former. The two projects are, as Mills calls them, “Playfully hostile siblings that love to steal from each other,” – they share music and words and DNA and impulses and a vision about what it means to be human in 2019, but don’t necessarily need one another.

The movie was composed like a piece of music; the music was assembled like a film, by a film director. The frontman and natural focal point was deliberately and dramatically side-staged in favour of a variety of female voices, nearly all of whom have long been in the group’s orbit. It is unlike anything either artist has ever attempted and also totally in line with how they’ve created for much of their careers.

Then around the 2:15 mark, the true nature of I Am Easy To Find announces itself: The racket subsides, strings swell, and the voice of long-time David Bowie bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey booms out – not as background vocals, not as a hook, but to take over the song.

Elsewhere it’s Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan, or Sharon Van Etten, or Mina Tindle or Kate Stables of This Is the Kit, or varying combinations of them. The Brooklyn Youth Choir, whom Bryce Dessner had worked with before. There are choral arrangements and strings on nearly every track, largely put together by Bryce in Paris – not a negation of the band’s dramatic tendencies, but a redistribution of them.

“Yes, there are a lot of women singing on this, but it wasn't because, ‘Oh, let's have more women's voices,”’ said Berninger. “It was more, ‘Let's have more of a fabric of people's identities.’ It would have been better to have had other male singers, but my ego wouldn't let that happen.”

The National have established themselves as mainstays of arenas and festivals with sold-out performances and headlining slots around the world. With the release of their most recent album, 2017 Grammy® Award-winning Sleep Well Beast scored #1's in the UK, Ireland, Portugal and Canada.